Brain injury study

Posted on: 12th April 2016

Community case management and care hours for clients with traumatic brain injury

Mark Holloway, brain injury case manager at Headfirst talks about an article published in Brain Injury following a study on the ‘Factors influencing community case management and care hours for clients with traumatic brain injury living in the UK’:

“In our roles as brain injury case managers and, for some of us, as care experts, we are often asked to predict or estimate level of likely service use. Bearing in mind the costs of the services we provide, getting this right is very important.

Historically our judgement has been made very much upon our experience which, whilst essential and useful, is subject to questioning and criticism. Possibly the hardest issue to assess, executive impairment (especially if an individual lacks complete insight) is often over-looked by non-specialist services; “he looks ok to me” being said when these invisible difficulties are missed.

With this in mind a number of us looked at what we could do to try and more objectively assess this. Jo Clark Wilson of Head First was very keen to use the data that our organisation had generated over the years to see if we could establish patterns of service use; to this end we undertook to complete the Adaptive Behaviour and Community Competency Scale (ABCCS) assessment form and relate this to service use, case management and support work.

To broaden the research we asked our colleagues in the British Association of Brain Injury Case Managers (BABICM) whether they would be prepared to support this and, unsurprisingly but really pleasingly, a large number gave their time for free to help this endeavour.

All of this data was analysed by a specialist statistician and some patterns and correlations were identifiable. What was great about the results is that they fit with our practice and understanding: lower levels of insight and increased behavioural disorder are associated with higher rates of case management. Our experience and our hunches turn out to be corroborated by the data.

The research has been written up and published in Brain Injury. In order that the maximum number of people can benefit from this and to ensure those who contributed can use the research, it has been decided to make this paper open access.

This has taken some time to achieve and would not have been possible without a lot of work from a lot of people around the country. Hopefully we can now all use the results to help us in discussions with funders.”